Wood Romances

Update (12/29/2024):  The paper I discuss below was retracted a couple days ago, citing failures in the peer-review process. "Subsequent to acceptance of this paper, the rigor and quality of the peer-review process for this paper was investigated and confirmed to fall beneath the high standards expected by Applications in Engineering Science . After review by additional expert referees, the Editor-in-Chief has lost confidence in the validity of the paper and has decided to retract." A paper published earlier this year is the latest in the long history of attempts to show that CO2 is already "saturated" in the atmosphere, and therefore increased CO2 cannot cause any more warming. The latest in a series of these kinds of papers from Kubicki et al 2024[1] attempts to make this point by modeling the atmosphere in a couple different experiments. The result of their experiments suggested to them that we should question whether "additionally emitted CO2 in the atmosp...

Ole Humlum published a paper about 10 years ago attempting to show that CO2 always lags temperature and therefore the increase in CO2 substantially comes from an increase in temperature, not the other way around. In the words of Humlum's paper, As cause always must precede effect, this observation demonstrates that modern changes in temperatures are generally not induced by changes in atmospheric CO2. Indeed, the sequence of events is seen to be the opposite: temperature changes are taking place before the corresponding CO2 changes occur. and  CO2 released from anthropogene [sic] sources apparently has little influence on the observed changes in atmospheric CO2, and changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.  What I want to show two things here. First, Humlum's argument is fatally flawed logically, and he has to hide that flaw with by detrending the data. Second, even if we were take his claims, it leads to absurd conclusions. Humlum's Fatal Log...